Tent camp overtook neighborhood
Everybody’s had troublesome neighbors at some point, but pity the folks who live on Potrero Hill’s Vermont Street.
Over the past six months, a homeless tent camp exploded on their street, quickly expanding into the sidewalks, parking spaces, alleys and neighboring blocks.
Scores of people lived in this Kolkata-like shantytown of tents, sleeping bags and makeshift wooden structures that extended out from the corner of Vermont and 17th streets. The campers cooked over open flames, used injection drugs and ran bicycle chop shops. The camp was dotted with propane tanks, barbecues, rodents and feces.
It was all there, right in the middle of San Francisco, for everybody to see.
After frustrated neighbors directed hundreds of calls, emails and social media contacts to city officials over several months, much of the camp was cleared beginning in mid-June and continuing this week by a team from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. This coincided with when The Chronicle started inquiring about it, but department representatives say the camp was long tagged for clearing.
Thirty-six people camping along Vermont Street were placed in homeless shelters,
Navigation Centers, treatment beds and elsewhere. An additional 40 have been moved from camps along 16th Street. But some tents still dot the blocks around Vermont Street, signaling just how daunting a challenge resolving the problem will be. Neighbors are cautiously optimistic, but still frustrated the problem got so bad and is still not entirely resolved.
“It’s better on Vermont, but you just turn the corner and they’re all there,” Marcy Fraser, a 64-year-old nurse said last week. “I think people are trying to be optimistic, but it’s really, really hard.”
She can’t shake the image, the day after the Vermont Street section was cleared, of a homeless man left behind, nearly naked, filthy, clearly deranged and sitting in a pile of junk.
“The person looked Third World — worse than that,” she said. “I feel guilty. I feel powerless. It’s frustrating, and it’s kind of frightening that we as a society let it go like that to that degree.”
She’s not the only Vermont Street neighbor feeling that way. Two homes away from her lives Louk Stephens, a 43-yearold vice president of an investment management firm. He grew up in San Francisco and bought a house on Vermont Street 12 years ago. He and his wife have two young boys, but raising them in the city has recently become much harder.
Suddenly, everyday family life has changed. Exploring their neighborhood with the boys on foot? Nope. Walking their dogs? Nope — have to pile in the car and drive elsewhere for that. Letting the boys play in the sandbox at the nearby Jackson Playground? No way. Too many dirty needles.
“I’ve seen all the worst things you can see,” Stephens said. “I’ve seen people injecting needles into their arms, people defecating and urinating in the street, many stacks of what appear to be stolen bikes and people disassembling them, people cooking with open flames on the street, animals being neglected that are wandering around in the camps.
“It’s really discouraging,” he continued. “And it’s hard to explain to kids.”
No kidding. Readers frequently email and call me with similar reports of tent camps popping up in their neighborhoods, allowed to expand across sidewalks, parking spaces and into the streets. Criminal activity is obvious, but the camps persist.
Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, “You’re not compassionate. Where are these poor people supposed to go?”
But there’s a difference now. San Francisco has had a homeless problem for decades and the city has tried to respond with love and care. I rarely hear complaints from readers about homeless people sitting on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign, asking for money. In those cases, readers ask how to help.
But these camps are different, and the readily apparent criminal activity inside them is dangerous for everybody, from those living in them to those living around them or just walking past.
I try to respond to all of the readers who write about these burgeoning shantytowns, and many write back that they’re shocked anybody bothered to acknowledge their complaint. Nobody else does.
Stephens said he made at least 50 calls to the city’s 311 service portal and City Hall officials in the past few months. His neighbors are also constantly phoning, emailing and reaching out to city leaders on social media. He said the 311 call takers tell him the camps have already been assigned a case number, and officials know about them. That’s usually more of a response than he gets from the mayor’s office or his supervisor, Malia Cohen.
Cohen said before the Vermont Street camp began being cleared that she was very aware of the neighborhood’s sprawling tent encampments and agreed they’re a big problem. But she said residents don’t like hearing that clearing camps effectively takes time, and there’s no easy, overnight solution.
“You give them a very real answer, and they reject it and then they say you’re being unresponsive,” Cohen said. “I can meet with my police captain and say, ‘Please keep this area clean and enforce the laws on the books.’ But in the end, we’re legislators. We have a limited amount of power in our ability to affect the most basic things, like keeping the streets clean.
“I can get a temporary sweep done, but it’s not long-term because in the end, where am I putting these people?” she continued. “People who are shooting up? Where do they go?”
If Cohen can’t get anything done about the camps quickly, imagine how powerless the residents forced to live beside them feel.
Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said his staff keeps a list of tent encampments and works methodically to clear them, one by one, in an effort to avoid them just springing back up somewhere else.
“It’s not common sense to go to an encampment and tell everybody to move,” Kositsky said.
Sam Dodge, Kositsky’s deputy director, said the work at the base of Potrero Hill will continue in an effort to completely resolve the encampments that sprawl along several blocks there.
“We’re committed to resolving the whole area,” he said, adding that the teams will be there “as long as it takes.”
Fraser and her neighbors hope that’s not too much longer. She contacted me in May in frustration after getting a note from Recology saying she’d be fined if her trash, recycling and composting kept getting mixed up in the wrong bins.
She said she’s always careful about recycling and composting, and that it’s the nearby camp dwellers who come by late at night, strewing trash all over and mixing up the bin contents in search of cans and bottles. And yet she was the one who faced punishment. (Recology has not actually levied the fine and, when I called about it, said Fraser is a great customer.)
Fraser is incredibly compassionate toward homeless people and has walked among the campers several times. She said the campers have been friendly, but she can’t believe the city allowed them to live like that for so long.
“I certainly don’t know what the answer is,” she said. “I appreciate that it’s a horrible conundrum, I do, but it’s just really become so unsanitary and disgusting.”
Right there in the middle of San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the world.